Successful businesses are only as good as the partnerships they foster.
In the challenging, fast-paced business environment of today, going it alone is a dangerous road to take. Key, strategic relationships are built on a foundation of being mutually beneficial, collaborative and filled with trust. For Valdera and Toray Industries, the two companies exemplify what it means to be a good business partner.
Founded by brother and sister Dheev and Sruti Arulmani, Valdera is an AI-native sourcing platform that streamlines the process of buying and selling quality chemicals and raw materials. Its platform brings buyers, suppliers, brands, manufacturers and producers globally together and ensures the products that make the world go round get developed quickly, sustainably and to the best quality. Toray Industries is an integrated chemical group which fuses nanotechnology into operations, using organic synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry and biotechnology as its core technologies.
At DPW Amsterdam 2025, Dheev Arulmani, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Valdera and John Eustis, Chief Procurement Officer at Toray Industries, sit down with CPOstrategy to reveal exactly what makes their business relationship tick.
Developing the Valdera – Toray Industries partnership
When Toray began looking for procurement technology to leverage, Eustis stresses the necessity of solving the business problem first and foremost. While Toray possessed numerous long-standing relationships and had great market knowledge, where they had a gap was within the mid-range chemicals space – which is what led them to Valdera’s door. “We buy a lot of specialty chemicals, single sourced items that the team just didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on and really understand the market,” says Eustis. “When we first started talking to Valdera, we saw an opportunity to address that blind spot. It’s been a great opportunity for us to partner and evaluate sources of supply we didn’t even know existed and makes it much more efficient for the buying community at Toray.”
“When we built the business about five years ago, John was one of the first people that I met through the MIT alumni network,” Arulmani reveals. “Toray were one of the first organisations to say, ‘Hey, we believe in this technology, we believe in the direction of AI and data science and how that’s going to shape the future of procurement organisation for manufacturers.’ We’ve partnered together over the last three or four years, and since then every year we’ve thought about what the next chapter of the partnership could look like.”
Eustis adds that Valdera’s ability to take the time to listen to each specific problem and work on finding the right solution sets its solution apart. “I think it’s a great partnership and we love to work with tech providers that really work to understand your needs and evolve the platform to meet the requirements,” he adds. “I think the relationship has lasted this long because Valdera does a brilliant job doing that and we look forward to working together more in the future.”
Making tech work
The primary theme from this year’s DPW Amsterdam was the notion of putting AI to work. With advanced technologies such as agentic AI pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in procurement and supply chain, the time is now to drive real change within organisations and unlock unprecedented time and cost savings. According to Arulmani, the chemical and manufacturing industries are facing increasingly complex global supply chains, where volatility, multi-tier supplier networks, and rising sustainability pressures make it essential to harness technology.
“The industry is still extremely antiquated,” Arulmani explains. “Many companies are still manually comparing spec sheets and emailing suppliers for data. At Valdera, we see a much more modern and AI driven way to manage this process. By applying artificial intelligence to the vast amount of existing data across internal systems and external sources, we can digitise the entire sourcing workflow from identifying suppliers to analysing quotes and make it dramatically faster and smarter.”
Eustis believes that as an operating company, Toray must free up its procurement team to drive greater strategic value instead of being siloed with mundane roles that agentic AI can help with. “Agentic AI is the future and we must leverage it to automate and streamline those basic tasks that humans have done for however long,” explains Eustis. “Agentic AI allows humans to do much more important things such as focus on supply relationship management strategy and improve the value creation process for procurement within the organisation.
“For us, it’s about how do we solve the business challenges that we have? AI is in the forefront of everyone’s mind, but it’s really about how we enable AI to solve real world business problems. Partnering with Valdera is one opportunity for us, but also coming to DPW and hearing all about the advances in AI and how it can be used to solve business challenges has been great.”
Valdera has built a matching algorithm that uses AI to take specific requests from a buyer and identify all the suppliers in the world that can meet those exact specifications.
“If you think about the workflow a category manager goes through, there are countless small, repetitive steps that can be digitised with agentic AI,” he says. “That might include comparing spec sheets, processing R&D data, analyzing incoming quotes, or even supporting parts of a negotiation. We see a broader AI layer that can be applied across the supply chain, while these smaller agentic models automate the individual tasks that are often the most manual and time-consuming.”
Future proofing
Looking forward, both companies are positioned in a very strong place to thrive in this digital era. For Toray, the organisation is managing categories in a way previously unprecedented. Toray now has access to the latest developments in the market and it should respond to navigate those changes. “I always say knowledge is power in a negotiation,” explains Eustis. “The more you know about the marketplace, the suppliers, the pricing in every region of the world, then the more prepared you are to go into a negotiation with those suppliers. That’s really made our buyers much more of an expert in their field without extensive amounts of training.”
In Valdera’s case, the next few years are focused on evolution and expansion. Arulmani explains that the goal is to continue transforming the platform by deepening partnerships with companies like Toray and building new features that enable their success in the next generation of procurement. “I truly believe that a year or two from now, technology will look very different,” says Arulmani. “Given the pace at which AI and related capabilities are advancing, the key is to keep evolving the platform and leveraging the underlying data to help organisations like Toray drive growth, strengthen their supply chains, and build long-term resilience.”
Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.
Find out more about Valdera here.